The present invention relates to the field of reuse of resources. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and system for determining a reuse factor associated with a set of resources available for a project.
Currently, in the software industry, a number of existing resources are used to build new software. Examples of these resources include program codes, tools, methodologies, tables, and so forth. The resources available to the software industry may be used in the various stages of different projects. The use of existing resources helps in minimizing the costs incurred in the development of software, which, in turn, also reduces the cost transferred to the consumers of the software. The use of existing resources also helps in minimizing the amount of effort required to develop software.
There are a few existing techniques that help in quantifying the amount of effort saved by the use of existing resources. Typically, these techniques quantify the effort saved by the reuse of resources on the basis of the total number of hours that are saved by the reuse of these resources in a particular project. Some of these techniques quantify the effort saved by the reuse of resources on the basis of the amount of effort saved by using the corresponding resources.
Quantifying the amount of effort saved by the use of existing resources helps in defining strategies for the reuse of resources. Various industries benefit by using strategies to minimize the time, cost and effort required to complete a project. This further helps in reducing the time to market.
However, the techniques stated above have a number of limitations. Although some of these techniques provide a measure related to the reuse of resources, they do not provide information related to efficiency in the reuse of resources. For example, these techniques do not provide information related to the resources available to a team for executing a project, and the number of resources that are not being used effectively. Further, the reuse is an absolute number in terms of effort which is typically measured on the basis of the size of the project. However, this may not provide an accurate estimate of the efficiency in the reuse of resources. For example, the effort saved by the reuse of resources in a big project may be greater than that in a small project, but it does not represent the efficiency in the reuse of resources. Moreover, these techniques do not make use of the relevance of a resource in a project. This also results in inaccuracy in the estimation of the efficiency in the reuse of resources.
In light of the forgoing, there is a need for a method for efficiently estimating the reuse of resources. Further, the method should estimate the efficiency in the reuse of resources on the basis of the relevance of resources in various stages of a project.